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Greenwich.HR Leverages Sigma to Enter a Prohibitive Market, Projects >$1M in New Revenue
Greenwich.HR is a global provider of real-time labor market intelligence. The company consolidates online public data about hiring, jobs, pay, skills, and experience from nearly 4 million companies and over 700 million individual profiles in 200 countries which translates to 80% of all hiring data in developed countries. They use artificial intelligence methods to normalize and consolidate data from millions of sources into a common framework with Snowflake and Sigma being at the core of their analytics stack.
Greenwich.HR wanted to create a general purpose, easy-to-use labor market dashboard that anyone could use—an application that would provide a window into real-time hiring and pay data across multiple different dimensions.
“Initially, we would sell access to our data platform to companies that would build products on top of our data,” shares Cary Sparrow, Founder & CEO of Greenwich.HR. “Post-pandemic, pay and hiring went completely beyond traditional expectations.”
While their data platform allowed Greenwich.HR and their key clients to see what was going on in this fast-changing labor market, the company identified a huge need for these insights to be extended beyond their existing clients. “So, we wanted to find a partner who could help us build an application where everyone could see what was going on in real time, and also help us reach a limitless number of clients,” adds Cary.
In their pursuit of a perfect analytics partner, Greenwich.HR evaluated six companies including Looker, Power BI, Tableau, and others. Very quickly, the team found out that these traditional business intelligence tools could not handle the scale of their data.
“All of the traditional BI platforms have significant limitations in their ability to handle large-scale data sets and tables, like ours, that run into billions of rows. They just break even with a tiny fraction of our dataset,” shares Cary. In order to have a viable BI product, the Greenwich.HR users also need to be able to filter across lots of dimensions—job titles, locations, time periods, industries, companies, etc. Visuals need to be updated in a second or two and that requires extremely fast and efficient processing. Plus, data needs to be updated daily at scale, requiring extremely fast and reliable automated data load and update capabilities.
Some of the popular platforms that have been retrofitted for the cloud are slow, visually limiting, and pose a data integration challenge. They are clearly not equipped to handle the speed and scale at which Greenwich.HR operates. “We spent months developing proofs of concept, and in the end concluded it just wasn’t possible using any of these platforms,“ Cary tells us.
The limitations posed by the legacy tools and platforms led Greenwich.HR to Sigma, a tool purpose-built for the modern cloud data warehouse.
With Sigma, we saw a market opportunity that no one else could help us capitalize on.
—Cary Sparrow, Founder & CEO, Greenwich.HR
Sigma serves as foundational for building WageScape, next-generation compensation intelligence tool and a mission-critical product for the company designed to provide the insights needed in today’s fast-moving, hyper-competitive talent market. Sigma sits right on top of Snowflake, and WageScape gets automatically updated when Snowflake is updated as part of the company’s core operations. As a result, their customers have complete visibility around hiring and pay data for any job, in any market, at any time with the additional ability to filter data in seconds.
With Sigma, Greenwhich.HR was able to deploy and monetize a highly differentiated product under a tight timeline with limited data resources. This let them enter an extremely costly and prohibitive market where they started to see sales, while still in beta.
In just three working sessions, Sigma was able to recreate a sample dashboard, allowing Greenwhich.HR to create a prototype for their new product, WageScape. The technical development took just a couple of weeks, as per Cary.
The typical visualization tools evaluated during the process were pretty limited in functionality. The proofs of concept built using more traditional BI tools failed and while “they were good enough to show different kinds of visuals, they broke at scale and would never be a production tool," as per Daniela. “The seamless integration that Sigma has with Snowflake is very valuable to us. The most powerful features of Sigma are the ‘drill down’ and ‘filtering’ capabilities. The UI visualizations are really nice and very professional, too.”
“The materialized view feature in Sigma is huge. We were super impressed with our first call with Sigma… you guys already understood our use case and your sales tech team helped us walk through how you would put together a dashboard that met our specifications," adds Cary.
The implementation was simple and the customer support they received was excellent. They did not need to hire anyone, saving them upward of $100k in developer costs. Greenwich.HR’s clients also see huge cost and time savings. Cary adds, “It would have taken several days for a client to do these types of analyses, if they could do it at all. And, with Sigma we're able to provide the insights they need in just a couple of seconds. Sigma’s ability to tightly integrate with Snowflake coupled with high performance has been a game changer.”
The embedded analytics functionality opened up a “new sales channel” for Greenwich.HR. Cary says, “We have productized our partnership approach with WageScape. So we'll be working to get WageScape embedded with more technology partners and more applications. The ability of technology providers to easily embed our marketing intelligence into their own applications is huge."
We're projecting WageScape—powered by Sigma—will give us seven-digit revenue from new incremental sales in the first year of operations.
—Cary Sparrow, Founder & CEO, Greenwich.HR
In the first three months following its launch, Greenwich.HR struck 12 deals with technology providers where WageScape is embedded in their platforms. The technology partners get premium extensions that bring new revenue, and Greenwich.HR gets a channel partner and is able to reach a broader audience more quickly, as a result. Plus, consultants and recruiting firms are able to easily build WageScape into their consulting engagements, and then build the cost of their clients’ subscription into those engagements. This translates to better client service and more business for everyone.
